I was pretty shocked to see this facebook ad. I was intrigued. Could it be some interesting social media campaign? I clicked. It landed on a personal profile as you can see. The guy has been in the game ( registered FB user ) since 2010. Hence, most probably he is following the Lara Kay path, and trying to get some extra attention, or is just plain bored and playing with facebook advertising.

For those of you who can not understand Lebanese slang this ad says: “I am in Beirut now and I want a girl to spit in my face … and I am not kidding”.

In any case for a marketer, especially one that works in social media, such occurrences really put an interesting perspective into our industry. Traditional billboards are overtaken by people posting Birthday wishes and love messages, while on Facebook, Sayfco ads come hand in hand by a guy who wants to find a girl to spit on his face. And I suspect, since facebook can’t really filter out Lebanese slag his ad got approved.

This definitely beats politicians promoting their facebook pages. Have you seen weirder Facebook ads? I am dying to know!

Last year Jamal Trust Bank launched endearing visuals to promote their personal loans, and well this year I feel they have outdone themselves, as they created ads that really grab your attention, and for me present great visual remixes of street art and”street culture heritage” that really etch the brand into your brain and make you associate these common place objects, when you see them “off-bilboard” with the brand’s message, which is something every brand dreams of. My favorite, is their interpretation of ”back of the truck advertising” , now every time I see a truck with these funny phrases they have, I think about JTB. And the copywriting is such a good play on words, don’t you think?

A lot of my stress in Lebanon is related to the plight of recklessness that we witness on our roads be it from pedestrians or from drivers. The Lebanese roads mayhem, can only be more favorable that the driving habits in Egypt, which is known to be utterly ‘kamikazeh’ reckless.

My little sister was so joyous that James Blunt was coming to Lebanon, to be fair she’s happy when any artists comes to Lebanon even when she does not get to go to the concert. She went to her first ever live performance last month when Shakira was here. I asked her if she saw her from the place they were at , she said when she zoomed in with her camera into the stage she was able to catch a glimpse. Then I asked her if she knew that would happen and that she needed to stand in a crowd of screaming people for hours would she still have went, she said DEFINITELY.

So now, as you may have guessed she’s going to the James Blunt Concert on Monday and she’s really excited! She’s counting down the days and today she drew the artwork above to show her excitement and support Tamanna (I think the guy with the glasses is supposed to be James Blunt) .

As you may know, what is amazing about this concert is that it is organized to fulfill a child’s wish, and all the proceeds from the international signer’s concert are also going in support of many other wishes for children with terminal illnesses and improving their quality of life. So all of this is a fantastic international collaboration between Tamanna and James Blunt that enables everyone to help and support either through ticket sales, awareness raising, or simply wearing a white T-shirt.

In general, I always felt that political parties in Lebanon are always ready to try out new technologies,they were the first to have community portals, news portals and forums, and it seems that now they are even more actively embracing new media. Be ware!

Last week I gave two lectures at the Amercian University of Beirut as part of the AUB Online Collaborative #SM101 Series.

In the first I spoke briefly about how Social Media should be approached and some do’s and don’ts expressed by case studies from the Middle East. The below slides cover glibly what we talked about (hopefully I can post a video of it soon). The lovely Brooke Anderson from the Daily Star wrote an insightful overview of the lecture here.

The second was an introduction to Social Media Monitoring and was all about the free tools one can use to monitor social media activity and creative way of putting them to use. Let me know if there are any tools you love to use that were not mentioned here.

In Ramadan people start behaving irrationally and gluttonously, buying everything they find in their way, buying at excess… People start buying kilos of sweets everyday. However, buying sweets, especially in the first days if Ramadan, can sometimes be a battle. The below is a video taken by our office boy at Safsouf Sweets in Beirut when he was trying to buy sweets at 3;00 pm on the second day of Ramadan. It took him one hour to buy the sweets.According to my boss, who has ordered the sweets, though Safsouf is a very old and traditional store, with no pompous decor… people go to him for genuine taste. Still I can not imagine waiting to get sweets, in a sweets shop full of aromas, for an hour while I am fasting. Could you?

I have not seen such a stampede in a shop even when I was a little girl in the USSR and food was rationed and you needed to stand for hours in line to get anything.